Skip to main content

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

3 comments

Robots That Can Finally Feel: Scientists Create Ultra-Sensitive Artificial Skin That Rivals Human Touch

Robots today can see with high-resolution cameras and move with incredible precision. They can assemble cars, explore dangerous environments, and even assist surgeons. However, one crucial human ability still remains difficult for robots to replicate—the sense of touch.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a new miniature tactile sensor that brings robots much closer to experiencing touch the way humans do. The technology could dramatically improve how robots interact with objects, making them safer, more precise, and more useful in real-world environments.

The breakthrough sensor uses advanced materials including graphene and liquid metal composites. The research, published in the journal Nature Materials, shows that robots equipped with this artificial skin can detect pressure, force direction, slipping objects, and surface roughness—similar to the capabilities of human fingertips.

Why Touch Is So Difficult for Robots

Humans rely heavily on touch when interacting with the world. When you hold a glass of water, your fingers constantly sense pressure, texture, and tiny movements. If the glass begins to slip, your brain instantly reacts and tightens your grip.

This complex sensing ability comes from specialized nerve endings in our skin called mechanoreceptors. These receptors detect different kinds of signals, such as pressure, vibration, and motion across the skin.

Recreating this level of sensory ability in robots is extremely challenging. Many existing tactile sensors suffer from several problems:

  • They are too large to place in small robotic fingers.

  • They are fragile and wear out quickly.

  • They are expensive or difficult to manufacture.

  • They cannot accurately detect multiple types of forces at once.

According to Professor Tawfique Hasan from the Cambridge Graphene Centre, these limitations have slowed progress toward truly dexterous robots.

For robots to handle delicate objects—like fruit, glassware, or surgical tools—they must be able to sense not just how hard they are pressing but also how the object is moving against their surface.

The Materials Behind Artificial Skin

To overcome these challenges, the Cambridge research team designed a completely new type of tactile sensor using advanced composite materials.

The sensor combines three important components:

Graphene sheets – ultra-thin layers of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. Graphene is incredibly strong, flexible, and highly conductive.

Liquid metal microdroplets – tiny deformable droplets that change electrical properties when pressure is applied.

Nickel particles – magnetic particles that help improve sensitivity and signal response.

All of these materials are embedded inside a soft silicone matrix, creating a flexible and durable sensing surface.

This combination allows the sensor to bend, stretch, and respond to mechanical forces in ways that resemble natural skin.

Inspired by the Structure of Human Skin

One of the most innovative aspects of the new technology is its structure.

Instead of being flat, the material is shaped into microscopic pyramid structures. Some of these pyramids measure only about 200 micrometers wide, which is roughly twice the width of a human hair.

These tiny pyramids serve an important function.

When force is applied, stress becomes concentrated at the tips of the pyramids. This concentration allows the sensor to detect extremely small forces while still handling larger pressure levels.

The result is a sensor that is both highly sensitive and capable of measuring a wide range of forces.

In fact, researchers demonstrated that the device can detect something as small as a single grain of sand pressing against its surface.

Compared with existing flexible tactile sensors, the new design improves both size and detection sensitivity by nearly ten times.

Detecting the Direction of Force

Another key advantage of the new sensor is its ability to measure the direction of forces.

Most traditional tactile sensors can only measure normal pressure—the force pushing directly down onto a surface. However, in real life, objects often move sideways across our skin, creating what scientists call shear forces.

Detecting these shear forces is essential for recognizing when an object is slipping.

The Cambridge sensor solves this problem using four electrodes placed beneath each pyramid structure. By analyzing signals from these electrodes, the system can mathematically reconstruct the full three-dimensional force vector in real time.

In simpler terms, the sensor can determine:

  • How strong the force is

  • Which direction the force is coming from

  • Whether an object is sliding or slipping

This information allows robots to instantly adjust their grip.

Robots That Can Handle Fragile Objects

To demonstrate the technology, researchers integrated the sensors into robotic grippers.

The results were impressive.

Robots equipped with the new tactile skin were able to pick up fragile objects such as thin paper tubes without crushing them.

Instead of relying on pre-programmed assumptions about the object, the robot continuously monitored the tactile signals from its sensors.

If the object began to slip, the robot automatically adjusted its grip strength in real time.

This adaptive behavior is very similar to how humans instinctively handle delicate objects.

Such capability could greatly improve robots used in manufacturing, food handling, and warehouse automation.

Tiny Sensors for Microrobots and Surgery

The benefits of this technology extend beyond large robotic systems.

Because the sensors are extremely small, they can also be used in microscale applications.

In laboratory experiments, arrays of these miniature sensors were used to analyze tiny metal spheres. By studying the magnitude and direction of forces during contact, the system could determine properties such as:

  • Mass

  • Shape

  • Material density

This level of precision opens the door to new possibilities in microrobotics and minimally invasive surgery, where tools must interact with extremely small and delicate structures inside the human body.

Traditional force sensors are often too large for these applications, making the Cambridge design especially valuable.

Transforming Prosthetic Limbs

Another promising application is in advanced prosthetics.

Modern prosthetic limbs are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with some capable of controlled movement using neural signals from the user. However, many prosthetic devices still lack realistic tactile feedback.

Without a sense of touch, it can be difficult for users to judge how firmly they are holding an object.

Miniaturized 3D tactile sensors like the one developed in Cambridge could help solve this problem.

By integrating these sensors into artificial hands, prosthetic devices could provide more detailed feedback about pressure, texture, and movement.

This improvement would allow users to interact with everyday objects more naturally and confidently.

Moving Toward Fully Sensory Artificial Skin

Lead author Guolin Yun, formerly a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at Cambridge and now a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, says the work shows that highly complex mechanical systems are not necessary for advanced tactile sensing.

Instead, combining smart materials with bio-inspired structures can produce performance that approaches the capabilities of human skin.

The research team believes the sensors could be miniaturized even further—possibly shrinking to less than 50 micrometers.

At that scale, the density of sensors could begin to match the density of mechanoreceptors in real human skin.

Future versions may also include additional sensing capabilities, such as:

  • Temperature detection

  • Humidity sensing

  • Surface vibration analysis

Together, these features could create a multimodal artificial skin capable of perceiving the environment in several ways simultaneously.

A New Era for Robots in the Real World

As robots increasingly leave controlled factory settings and enter everyday environments—such as homes, hospitals, and disaster zones—the ability to safely interact with objects becomes critical.

Vision alone is not enough.

A robot may be able to see a glass cup, but without a sense of touch, it cannot reliably determine how tightly to hold it.

Advanced tactile sensors like the one developed at Cambridge could change that.

By giving machines the ability to feel, scientists are bringing robots one step closer to human-like interaction with the physical world.

The research team has already filed a patent through Cambridge Enterprise, the university’s innovation division, suggesting that commercial applications may soon follow.

If successful, this technology could redefine how robots work alongside humans—making them not just machines that see and act, but machines that truly sense and respond to touch.

Reference: Yun, G., Chen, Z., Chen, Z. et al. Multiscale-structured miniaturized 3D force sensors. Nat. Mater. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-026-02508-7

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

For years, scientists believed that adding even one qubit (a unit of quantum information) to a black hole needed energy. This was based on the idea that a black hole’s entropy must increase with more information, which means it must gain energy. But a new study by Jonah Kudler-Flam and Geoff Penington changes that thinking. They found that quantum information can be teleported into a black hole without adding energy or increasing entropy . This works through a process called black hole decoherence , where “soft” radiation — very low-energy signals — carry information into the black hole. In their method, the qubit enters the black hole while a new pair of entangled particles (like Hawking radiation) is created. This keeps the total information balanced, so there's no violation of the laws of physics. The energy cost only shows up when information is erased from the outside — these are called zerobits . According to Landauer’s principle, erasing information always needs energy. But ...
3 comments
Read more

Black Holes That Never Dies

Black holes are powerful objects in space with gravity so strong that nothing can escape them. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can slowly lose energy by giving off tiny particles. This process is called Hawking radiation . Over time, the black hole gets smaller and hotter, and in the end, it disappears completely. But new research by Menezes and his team shows something different. Using a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) , they studied black holes with quantum corrections. In their model, the black hole does not vanish completely. Instead, it stops shrinking when it reaches a very small size. This leftover is called a black hole remnant . They also studied something called grey-body factors , which affect how much energy escapes from a black hole. Their findings show that the black hole cools down and stops losing mass once it reaches a minimum mass . This new model removes the idea of a “singularity” at the center of the black hole and gives us a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Planetary Movements Might Explain Sunspot Cycles and Solar Phenomena

Sunspots, dark patches on the Sun's surface, follow a cycle of increasing and decreasing activity every 11 years. For years, scientists have relied on the dynamo model to explain this cycle. According to this model, the Sun's magnetic field is generated by the movement of plasma and the Sun's rotation. However, this model does not fully explain why the sunspot cycle is sometimes unpredictable. Lauri Jetsu, a researcher, has proposed a new approach. Jetsu’s analysis, using a method called the Discrete Chi-square Method (DCM), suggests that planetary movements, especially those of Earth, Jupiter, and Mercury, play a key role in driving the sunspot cycle. His theory focuses on Flux Transfer Events (FTEs), where the magnetic fields of these planets interact with the Sun’s magnetic field. These interactions could create the sunspots and explain other solar phenomena like the Sun’s magnetic polarity reversing every 11 years. The Sun, our closest star, has been a subject of scient...
Post a Comment
Read more